Abandon hope all ye who enter here – Dante’s Divine Comedy (Part I)

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate – Before the
Tomahawk Missiles start flying between Moscow and New York, Americans
had better educate themselves fast about the forces and the people who
claim that Russia covered up a Syrian government gas attack on its own people.
Proof no longer seems to matter in the rush to further transform the
world into Dante’s vision of Hell. Accusations made by anonymous
sources, spurious sources and outright frauds have become enough.
Washington’s paranoia and confusion bear an uncanny resemblance to the
final days of the Third Reich, when the leadership in Berlin became
completely unglued.
Tensions have been building since fall with accusations that Russian media interfered with our presidential election and is a growing threat to America’s national security. The latest WikiLeaks release strongly suggested that it was the CIA’s own contract hackers behind Hillary Clinton’s email leaks and not Russians.
The U.S. has a long reputation of accusing others of things they didn’t do
and planting fake news stories to back it up in order to provide a
cause for war. The work of secret counter intelligence services is to
misinform the public in order to shape opinion and that’s what this is.
The current U.S. government campaign to slander Russia over anything and
everything it does bears all the earmarks of a classic disinformation
campaign but this time even crazier. Considering that Washington has put
Russia, China and Iran on its anti-globalist hit-list from which no one
is allowed to escape, drummed up charges against them shouldn’t come as
a surprise. But accusing the Russians of undermining American democracy
and interfering in an election is tantamount to an act of war and that simply is not going to wash.

This time the
United States is not demonizing an ideological enemy (USSR) or a
religious one (al Qaeda, ISIS, Daesh etc.). It’s making this latest
venture into the blackest of propaganda a race war, the way the Nazis
made their invasion of Russia a race war in 1941 and that is not a war
the United States can justify or win.

The level and shrillness of the latest disinformation campaign has
been growing for some time. But the American public has lived in a
culture of fake news (formerly known as propaganda) for so long many have grown to accept fake newsas
real news. George Orwell saw this coming and here it is. As a big
supporter of U.S. military intervention in Cuba and avowed practitioner
of “yellow journalism”, in 1897 William Randolph Hearst admonished the illustrator he’d sent to Cuba who’d found no war to illustrate; “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Hearst eventually got his war and America’s experiment in imperialism was off and running.Americans should know by now that their country’s
wars are fertile ground for biased, one-sided, xenophobic, fake news and
the United States has been in a permanent state of war since 1941.
Although the targets have shifted over the years, the purpose of the
propaganda hasn’t. Most cultures are coerced, cajoled or simply
threatened into accepting known falsehoods demonizing their enemies
during wartime but no matter how frequently repeated or cleverly told—no
lie can hold if the war never ends.
The legendary Cold Warrior, Time and Life Magazine’s Henry Luce
considered his personal fight against Communism to be “a declaration of
private war.” He’d even asked one of his executives whether or not the
idea was probably “unlawful and probably mad?” Nonetheless, despite his doubts about his own sanity, Luce allowed the CIA to use his Time/Life as a cover for the agency’s operations and to provide credentials to CIA personnel.
Luce was not alone in his service to the CIA’s propaganda wars. Recently declassified documents
reveal the CIA’s propaganda extended to all the mainstream media
outlets. Dozens of the most respected journalists and opinion makers
during the Cold War considered it a privilege to keep American public
opinion from straying away from CIA control.
Now that the new Cold War has turned hot, we are led to believe that
the Russians have breached this wall of not-so-truthful journalists and
rattled the foundation of everything we are supposed to hold dear about
the purity of the U.S. election process and “freedom of the press” in
America.
Black propaganda is all about lying. Authoritarian governments lie
regularly. Totalitarian governments do it so often nobody believes them.
A government based on democratic principles like the United States is
supposed to speak the truth, but when the U.S. government’s own documents reveal it has been lying over and over again for decades, the jig is up.
Empires have been down this road before and it doesn’t end well.
Americans are now being told they should consider all Russian opinion as
fake and ignore any information that challenges the mainstream media
and U.S. government on what is truth and what is the lie. But for the
first time in memory Americans have become aware that the people
Secretary of State Colin Powell once called “the crazies”, have taken the country over the cliff.

The neoconservative hitmen and hit-ladies
of Washington have a long list of targets that pass from generation to
generation. Their influence on American government has been catastrophic
yet it never seems to end. Senator J. William Fulbright identified
their irrational system for making endless war in Vietnam 45 years ago
in a New Yorker article titled Reflections in Thrall to Fear.

“The truly remarkable thing about this Cold War psychology is the
totally illogical transfer of the burden of proof from those who make
charges to those who question them… The Cold Warriors, instead of having
to say how they knew that Vietnam was part of a plan for the
Communization of the world, so manipulated the terms of the public
discussion as to be able to demand that the skeptics prove that it was
not. If the skeptics could not then the war must go on—to end it would
be recklessly risking the national security.”Fulbright realized that Washington’s resident crazies
had turned the world inside out by concluding, “We come to the ultimate
illogic: war is the course of prudence and sobriety until the case for
peace is proved under impossible rules of evidence [or never]–or until
the enemy surrenders. Rational men cannot deal with each other on this
basis.” But these were not rational men and their need to further their
irrational quest only increased with the loss of the Vietnam War.
Having long forgotten the lessons of Vietnam and after a tragic repeat in Iraq that the highly respected General William Odom considered “equivalent to the Germans at Stalingrad,”
the crazies are at it again. With no one to stop them, they have kicked
off an updated version of the Cold War against Russia as if nothing had
changed since the last one ended in 1992. The original Cold War was
immensely expensive to the United States and was conducted at the height
of America’s military and financial power. The United States is no
longer that country. Since it was supposedly about the ideological
“threat” of Communism, Americans need to ask before it’s too late
exactly what kind of threat does a Capitalist/Christian Russia pose to
the leader of the “Free World” this time?
Muddying the waters in a way not seen since Senator Joe McCarthy and the height of the Red Scare in the 1950s, the “Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act” signed
into law without fanfare by Obama in December 2016 officially
authorizes a government censorship bureaucracy comparable only to George
Orwell’s fictional Ministry of Truth in his novel 1984. Referred to as “The Global Engagement Center,”
the official purpose of the new bureaucracy will be to “recognize,
understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda
and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national
security interests.”
But the real purpose of this totally Orwellian Center will be to
manage, eliminate or censor any dissenting views that challenge
Washington’s newly manufactured version of the truth and to intimidate,
harass or jail anyone who tries. Criminalizing dissent is nothing new in
time of war, but after 16 years of ceaseless warfare in Afghanistan, a
Stalingrad–like defeat in Iraq and with Henry Kissinger advising
President Trump on foreign policy, the Global Engagement Center has
already assumed the characteristics of a dangerous farce.
The brilliant American satirical songwriter of the 1950s and 60s Tom
Lehrer once attributed his early retirement to Henry Kissinger, saying
“Political satire became obsolete [in 1973] when Henry Kissinger was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Kissinger’s duplicitous attempts at
securing an “honorable peace” in America’s war in Vietnam deserved at
least ridicule. His long, drawn out negotiations extended the war for
four years at the cost of 22,000 American lives and countless
Vietnamese.
According to University of California researcher Larry Berman, author of 2001’s No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam,
the Paris peace accords negotiated by Kissinger were never even
expected to work, but were only to serve as a justification for a brutal
and permanent air war once they were violated. Berman writes, “Nixon recognized
that winning the peace, like the war would be impossible to achieve,
but he planned for indefinite stalemate by using the B 52s to prop up
the government of South Vietnam until the end of his presidency… but
Watergate derailed the plan.”The Vietnam War had broken the eastern establishment’s hold
over foreign policy long before Nixon and Kissinger’s entry onto the
scene. Détente with the Soviet Union had come about during the Johnson
administration in an effort to bring some order out of the chaos and
Kissinger had carried it through Nixon and Ford. But while dampening one
crisis, détente created an even worse one by breaking open the
longstanding internal-deep-state-struggle for control of U.S. policy
toward the Soviet Union.
Vietnam represented more than just a strategic defeat; it represented a conceptual failure
in the half-century battle to contain Soviet-style Communism. The
Pentagon Papers revealed the extent of the U.S. government’s deceit and
incompetence but rather than concede that defeat and chart a new course,
its proponents fought back with a Machiavellian ideological campaign
known as the experiment in competitive analysis or for short; Team B.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times in August 2004 in an article titled It’s Time to Bench “Team B”,
Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress
and assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985 came forward on
what he knew to be the real tragedy represented by 9/11. “The reports of
the Sept. 11 commission and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
missed the real problem facing the intelligence community, which is not
organization or culture but something known as the “Team B” concept.
And the real villains are the hard-liners who created the concept out of
an unwillingness to accept the unbiased and balanced judgments of
intelligence professionals.”